Original, documented and moving

The unlikely relationship between Kurt Gödel, the most famous logician of the twentieth century, manic and obsessive, and his wife Adele, music-hall dancer, gives rise to a moving love story. How can a couple survive lorsqu'existe there such an imbalance between the aspirations of both spouses? How can women be "normal" for a mathematician to the fragile mental health, and insensitive to the contingencies of material life? Yannick Grannec book some answers, sometimes nicely trivial "if men spent more often the broom, they would be less unhappy", "Our husbands were in need of alcohol basin or the stars to change the world, a tray of dirty dishes was enough for me. "

But this book is more than a love story, told in retrospect and with nostalgia, by an old lady on the verge of death. The rise of Nazism that grows into exile the German scientists, their installation in an America they discover the incredible intellectual soil that was Princeton, where we crossed Einstein, Oppenheimer, Pauli, von Neumann ... paranoia of McCarthyism, all these historical elements contribute to elegantly support the sentimental frame of the book.

Besides a lovely evocation of humor of Einstein, one will also find a healthy scratch from those who, even then, sought to seize the Gödel incompleteness theorem to make it say, in the areas of sociology or psychanayse for example, more than he said.

But it is not a biography in the strict sense, and many secondary characters are invented by the author. Systematic alternating chapters where meet two degrees of narrative (the story of a young woman trying to coax the cantankerous widow Gödel, and the memories it tells him) may annoy, but we made it . The book (451 pages) is probably a bit too long, but it is nicely written. The mathematical explanations, not very detailed, are accessible to novice and interesting. We leave this reading with great affection for the hard life that Ms. Gödel seems to have crossed, and admiration, pity mingled for her strange husband.

One last quote in conclusion: "There are 10 kinds of people Those who understand binary and others..."